Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

I've been writing again, and here's something different.  Vignettes and notes from the long piece I'm finishing this week.  Sometimes, the fiction we write can leave marks.  Deep marks.   While in Greece I've been working on the day job and getting back to my roots and me.  Enjoy the notes and windows into the next phase. Next time I'll pull out the notes on dating again.  Joy.  Now there's an absolute joy, so much that at one point I forgot how to speak English at the luscious advances of an American in Greece.  (Note the dripping sarcasm).   Greece has my heart in many ways, even with a stress and workload--this year--of epic proportions.  I am obsessed with life here, I keep coming back, and it feels like home time and time again.  Since that first voyage in 2013, when my best friend had to drag me back on the ferry to Turkey, to now when I wander Athens.  I stroll along these streets with such ease, knowing this c...

How does one start the next narrative? I do not know, yet here I am.   I'm back in Greece after a blissful month in the South of France.  There, I had elongated days filled with walks, stone fruits bleeding with juice, and the clicks of heels along smoothed cobblestones.  Of course, I stopped in Paris for a few sunsets, and then I spent nearly a month in Aix.  Knowing me as an urban dweller mainly thriving from smog and city noise, friends were keen to watch me as the days rolled by.  I have a hunch a few had bets I would lose my cookies and run back to the winding streets of Paris with panhandlers and pickpockets, tourist queues, and the endless noise and complacent stress of city life.  Instead, as the days lingered, I found a rhythm and solace within the small town.  Vendors at the market started to recognize me; the cafe I went to for iced coffee treated me as a local after my third visit--realizing I was there a long haul--as I blundered my F...

In late December, I tried to write again to fall short to the binds of writer's block and life. Yet, now, a month and a half later, here I am.   *** It's been three weeks now since the surgery narrative changed. The message on my phone saying she passed is still clear as day in my mind's eye. Two days ago, I let my iTunes play a random list of songs. That was my bad, knowing good and well that that's rarely a good idea.  Joanne came on, and it hit me as I climbed five floors, gasping for air--not from the steep ascension this time--as I struggled, shaking to put the key in my door. It's always something like that, a song out of the blue, to knock the wind and fragile peace right out of you.   That damned Lady Gaga song connected to us and me, and now it haunts me like a memory you can never fully pack away. I've lived longer with lupus and RA than I did without; that song was written about the loss of someone from lupus, yet in its release, it's more along ...

 Sitting an ocean away, on another summer of work via escapism (or is that vice versa), I've finally slowed down to process the past year.  The threats to unalive me from students, my resignation from there, my words being taken out of context (perhaps purposefully) in my day-to-day life and not even personally, to a three-word text, and being back together two weeks later, to being ghosted in the cold squalls of mid-February.  My head still spins at it all, especially with how busy I've been this year.  Though, as these things go, dreams and missed ones cross the mind's eye.  I'm still numb and waking up from the emotional coma.  It's not the emotional coma of 2020-1, but it hits different without a coherent definition or design.     While in France, I found a sense of peace one day.  I was so at ease and comfortable while kayaking that when someone asked where I was from, I answered something else.  Girls on the kayak away respon...

 At twenty-one minutes to midnight, my phone said, "Annessa, We're over."  I couldn't breathe, and I felt my heart stop.  My heart hasn't beat the same in the days since.  Like a country song, it hurts to breathe.  A handful of messages later, after I begged, he called in the cruelty of it all.   Our lives have been playing like a video reel in my mind, and us laughing for no reason while we rolled through yellow lights touching his Jeep's ceiling, driving down from Denver as darkness covered and snow fell. We wondered how anyone in Colorado got out of their driveways alive; we joked they probably weren't from there anyway. Our dogs carry beef rolls in the yard like cigars. Him popping out his elbow for me to take his arm as we walked down streets, across parking lots, or nearly anywhere. Him picking me up at the airport nervous, him picking me up at the airport and wrapping his arms around me to say, "welcome home." Our seemingly endless days an...

I've been back from my summer away for nearly two months. I finally put all my jewelry away that had been sitting in a lock box. I'd fish out a piece every now and then, but mostly I'd been wearing the hull I'd pulled out for the summer. That's how these things usually go. Yet, as I pulled the pieces from the box, I wasn't prepared for the memories woven into silver and stone. The black beaded chocker I wore to a friend's Vegas wedding, for which I was the Maid of Honor. She and I don't speak anymore, yet I can't pass on the necklace I've long not worn. It hangs on a back hook in the jewelry case, so I rarely see it. Memories of our twenty-year friendship linger, pervasive, and are here to stay like a roach infestation that baffles the best Orkin man, yet I won't reach out. Read a few posts back, as my heart doesn't have it left in me.     I don't have jewelry from my sister. There's a ring I bought for my Dad to give her. It'...

A couple of days ago, Tuesday, to be precise, as I walked down 186th with my dog, flashes of an old memory hit me so hard I nearly fell over. In the five or so minutes it took to get to Broadway, I found myself reliving a long-packed away memory of my sister and her long-gone motorcycle. It was a Honda, as I know someone will ask. Beyond that, my friends, it was silver, and I don't know anything of the makes, models, and snazz of bikes. Yet, I went to see my sister in the summer of 2000 when she first showed me her bikes. Well, they belonged to her and her then-girlfriend.   As sisters will do, the older one convinces the younger to go for a quick ride. Honestly, that wasn't hard. What she didn't realize, and was floored to learn, it was not my first time as a passenger. Though, for me, it was a complete shock that she rode bikes. Look, you all, my sister loved her truck, but she was never the type to devote an intense amount of energy to the road. She loved her speed, but ...